Chapter Text
The hall emptied the way water drains out of a crack in stone, slow at first, a murmur of chairs shifting and fabric rustling and the careful, diplomatic footsteps of countries who suddenly remembered they had somewhere else to be, and then faster, little clusters of movement, voices held deliberately low, as if talking at a normal volume anywhere near him would be admitting they'd been watching at full attention the whole time.
Serbia lay on the floor and listened to them go. The polished wood was cold against his hip and his ribs and the side of his face. His knees were pulled up to his chest.
The position hurt his lower back and the inside of him, a dull, deep, throbbing ache with real weight to it, like something heavy had been left behind his navel and forgotten there, but straightening his legs would mean uncurling, and uncurling would mean opening his body to the room again, and he would have happily died on that floor first. So he stayed where he was.
His skin was tacky. The come on his stomach and chest had cooled into a tight, itchy film that pulled every time he breathed. Between his thighs it was worse, still warm and still wet, sliding out of him in slow, humiliating little pulses he could feel and couldn't stop, soaking into the wood under his ass.
His whole body shook with a low, constant tremor that had nothing to do with him deciding anything, a shiver that came from somewhere deeper than muscle, like whatever part of him normally held everything level had been yanked out and nobody had bothered to put anything back in the hole.
His eyepatch was on. He'd managed that much. The elastic sat crooked over his ear and the patch had slipped a little off center so a sliver of scarred lid showed at the edge, and he knew it, and he couldn't make his hands go fix it.
His good eye was open. He stared at the leg of the nearest chair, dark polished wood maybe an arm's length from his face, and gave it the blank, stubborn attention of someone who'd decided that if he looked at one small stupid thing hard enough, the rest of the world might get bored and leave.
Above the chair leg, if he tipped his eye up even slightly, he would see the underside of the desk and the edge of the brass plate, and he didn't tip his eye up. He knew what it said. A drop of something, sweat or a tear he hadn't felt start, ran down the bridge of his nose and hung off the tip and fell, and he watched it darken a tiny circle in the varnish.
Most of them were gone now. He could tell by the way the room sounded, the way footsteps rang differently off empty seats, the missing hum of an audience breathing together. Heels clicked sharply across the far side of the hall and a door opened and swung shut. Another followed. A voice that might have been Albania's went past the doors, tight and clipped and too fast, getting smaller down a corridor.
He heard nothing from Kosovo at all, and the relief of that was almost a physical thing, a loosening under his ribs, because if Kosovo had said anything to anyone where Serbia could hear it, any reaction in that voice at all, it would have finished off whatever part of him was still managing to hold a shape.
Then he heard Montenegro. He'd have known those footsteps anywhere, quick and light and a little too careful, the walk of somebody who'd spent his whole life being the smallest one in the house and learning how not to get stepped on. They came down the aisle on the right. They came closer than they needed to, close enough that Serbia's eye slid sideways and caught the gold of a hand at the edge of the platform, resting on the corner of the desk, the desk with both their names folded up inside one word.
The hand stayed there. Serbia heard him take a breath, the kind you take right before you say something, and he lay very still and hated himself for how hard he was listening. "Brate," Serbia said, or his mouth said it, cracked and barely there, and the gold hand lifted off the desk.
The footsteps went on. They hitched once near the door, one little stutter in the rhythm like a skipped stair, and then the door opened and closed behind them with a soft, well-oiled click, and Serbia shut his eye and kept it shut for a while.
When he opened it again there were boots. These had come up on him without him noticing, which should have scared him and didn't have the energy to. Heavy boots, dark and scuffed and wide, planted near his head, and he didn't need to look any higher.
The tread had been heavy and slow and sure of itself in the way of somebody large who'd been large his whole life, a long way off from NATO's floor-shaking stride, and Serbia knew it the way he knew the ache in his back teeth before rain. Something old in him. Something too deep to dig out even on the days he wanted to.
Russia stood over him for what felt like a long time. The hall was nearly empty, just a few shapes lingering at the edges, figures in doorways who weren't quite leaving and weren't quite staying, and Serbia could feel Russia looking down at him and he hated it, hated the angle, his naked body balled up on the floor and Russia's boots at the level of his skull like he was something somebody had dropped. He waited for words. Some soft diplomatic nothing about the situation, or the process, or tomorrow. Russia didn't say anything.
Heavy fabric rustled, and then a weight came down over Serbia's shoulders and back, warm and rough and smelling of wool and cheap tobacco and outside air, a coat so big it covered him from his neck to his shins like a blanket off somebody's bed.
Serbia's hand came up before he told it to and fisted in the collar and dragged it tighter. He hid in it. The wool scratched his bare skin everywhere it touched, and it was the best thing he'd felt in hours.
Russia crouched down beside him. His knees cracked going down, the particular popping sound of a big man folding himself lower than he was built to go. From the corner of his eye Serbia caught the ushanka, that battered old fur hat sitting on white hair, and below it the face in its white and blue and red, and those half-lidded green eyes.
He'd been braced for pity. Or guilt, or that careful empty face Russia was so good at putting on when he didn't want to commit to having a feeling about anything. What he got was tired.
Russia looked tired and old in a way he hadn't a few years back, or maybe had and Serbia just hadn't been looking, the skin under his eyes gone bruised and papery, his mouth set like a drawer somebody had slammed. He looked like what he was, a man in his dead father's hat crouched next to the result of something he'd decided not to stop.
"You were here," Serbia said. His voice came out wrecked, hoarse and thick from crying, barely above a whisper, every consonant dragging across his throat like a rasp. "You were in the room."
Russia's jaw shifted. The red band across his lower face pulled tight, some muscle working underneath. He didn't deny it. He fixed the coat around Serbia's shoulders instead, tucking the edge in under his arm the way you'd tuck in someone in a hospital bed, and the gentleness of it sat so wrong against everything else that had happened to Serbia's body in the last hour that something gave way behind his breastbone.
His eye burned again. He clenched his teeth against it, because he was done crying, he was finished with it, he'd decided.
"You sat there," Serbia said, and his voice snapped on the second word, broke clean down the middle, and what came out of the break wasn't anything he'd want written down. "You sat there and you watched him. You watched him do it. You, you didn't, you just." He couldn't get to the end.
His hand shook inside the coat, gripping the wool so hard his knuckles hurt, and he pushed his face harder into the floor because looking at Russia's boots was easier than looking at Russia's face.
His teeth had started chattering, a fast stupid clicking he couldn't control, and he bit down on the inside of his cheek to stop it and tasted old blood where he'd already chewed through it earlier.
Russia's hand settled on his head. It was heavy and warm and covered most of Serbia's skull, the fingers curling around to rest at his temple just above the eyepatch strap, and the weight of it pressed his cheek into the wood the way gravity presses on things, without any push in it. It was just there.
Serbia's breath snagged. A wet, strangled noise squeezed out through his teeth, "nnhh," and he hated himself for leaning into it, hated how his body turned toward warmth like a plant toward a window, toward any hand that wasn't cold or clinical, like a dog rolling over for someone who'd never once stood up for it.
"Da," Russia said. He said it low, in the voice of someone who knows he has nothing to say in his own defense and isn't going to waste anybody's time pretending he does. He didn't explain.
He didn't bring up channels, or what he'd said in private, or the veto he'd have waved around if anybody had bothered to ask him first, which nobody had. He let the one word sit there between them, bare and useless, like a stone somebody had put on a grave.
"You could have," Serbia started, and stopped, because the truth was messier than that sentence wanted it to be and he knew it, even through the fog. Russia was big. Russia was still strong on paper, in theory, in what people remembered his father being, and everybody still flinched a little at the hat.
But NATO was bigger, NATO was a whole crowd of countries poured into one body and buttoned into a uniform, and Russia right now was a man rattling around in a house that had shrunk overnight, still trying to fill a coat that used to belong to someone huge, still broke, his money gone to paper barely half a year ago, still grieving in ways he'd sooner die than admit to.
Serbia had known all of that during the talks. He'd known it when Russia made his big low rumbling noises in NATO's direction and NATO had looked back at him with the patient, tolerant face of a man watching a large dog try to look scary.
He'd known it the night Russia turned his plane around over the ocean and went home in protest, which had felt like something for about a day, until the bombs fell anyway and the gesture turned out to weigh exactly as much as a plane full of air.
Russia couldn't have stopped this. Probably. Maybe. Serbia didn't know. What he knew was that Russia hadn't tried, and the gap between couldn't and didn't was a cut that wasn't going to close.
"Vstavay," Russia said, gently enough. His hand moved from Serbia's head to his shoulder and gripped through the wool. "The floor is cold."
Serbia didn't move. Maybe he couldn't. His body had locked itself into the curl, and the idea of straightening out, of standing up, of being upright and seen and having to walk past whoever was still hanging around in the corridors was so big his brain just slid off it.
"Ostavi me," he mumbled into the floor, and didn't let go of the coat. He lay under it breathing in short little hitches and stared at the dark smear on the boards where his own mess had pooled and started to dry.
Russia didn't leave. He stayed crouched there on the polished floor with one big hand on Serbia's shoulder, the ushanka knocked a little crooked, green eyes drooping half shut. He didn't rush him. He didn't say anything hopeful or useful or about the future.
At one point Serbia felt him shift and knew without looking that Russia had turned his head toward the desk, toward the wide empty chair and the brass plate shining its old name at a room with nobody in it, and Russia looked at it for a long moment and made a small sound in his nose that wasn't quite a laugh. "Big chair," he said. That was all.
Then he looked back down at Serbia, and his hand stayed put. He sat in the wreck with him like somebody who knew, somewhere in his bones where he never went looking, what it was to lie on a floor that used to be yours, in a room that had rearranged all its furniture around the gap where you used to be.
His thumb moved once, a small absent stroke along the ridge of Serbia's shoulder through the wool, and that did it. Serbia's eye screwed shut and his whole face folded in on itself, jaw and chin and mouth collapsing like a tent with the pole kicked out, and a sob punched up out of him that he'd sworn was over, he'd sworn it, and his body didn't give a shit what he'd sworn.
He pressed his forehead into the floor and cried with his mouth hanging open, no sound at all except the gasping, "hhh, hhk, hhh," and Russia's hand stayed exactly where it was, heavy and steady and not enough and there.
"Tikho, tikho," Russia murmured, rough, the way you'd talk down a horse. "Nu vsyo."
It wasn't over and they both knew it. The planes would go up again tonight, and the night after, and Russia wasn't going to stop those either.
When the shaking finally eased into something Serbia could almost live inside, Russia picked him up. He didn't do it fast. He gathered Serbia against his chest the way you'd lift something that might come apart in the middle, one arm under his shoulders and one across his back, and Serbia's face ended up mashed into the rough wool of Russia's shirt, tobacco and cold air filling his nose, and his hands came up on their own and grabbed two fistfuls of fabric and hung on with the dumb, desperate grip of fingers that had forgotten how to open.
Russia straightened up with a grunt, lifting him clean off the floor, and the coat stayed wrapped around him and hid everything, and Serbia's bare feet dangled and he hung against Russia's chest like something fished out of a river.
Russia turned toward the side door, away from the main corridor where voices still murmured and footsteps still rang. Serbia felt them pass the desk. He felt the edge of the brass plate go by somewhere near his feet, the wide empty chair sitting behind it with nobody to fill it, and he didn't lift his head and he didn't look back.
His face stayed buried. His blind eye throbbed under the crooked patch. His body ached in places he didn't have names for, deep bruised places that pulsed along with his heart, and between his legs the slow, filthy leak kept going, cooling as it crept down the inside of his thigh.
Russia's arms tightened around him as he shouldered the door open, and the ushanka brushed the top of Serbia's head, the old fur soft and worn and carrying the faintest smell of someone who had been much, much bigger than either of them, and Serbia twisted his fingers deeper into Russia's coat and held on.